I decided to dabble a little bit in HL2 editing. By god, this is a confusing editor. Anyway, here's what I came up with after a week with it. I did have a previous effort, but it sucked so bad an was wrong so I started over.



I took a look in the opening levels of HL2 itself, and... just wow. I can't believe how absolutely brilliant the original designers are. They have so many small, subtle touches in thier levels that make it feel totally immersive that I have to respect them. I'm having a hard time thinking of ideas to make this look more immersive and more like a city street, less like a floating plaza. And I don't know what to put in that raised platform right there.

[EDIT: Forgot to add, this is entirely for fun. I've been recruited onto a modding team for Red Orchestra, and as soon as they release the new Editor for RO, I'm gonna drop this and work on that.]

Model the windows some.

I can try. Any ideas for more buildings? Places to go? Tell me what you want. Also, if there are any HL2 editors here, t'would be neat if you could show me some handy Hammer tips.

add garbage cans, streetlights, power lines, garbage, etc. You want it to look like a real city, add stuff that's in a real city.

Forget what everyone else said. leave the plaza empty, but strew tons of crates around.


(Don't really please)

And explosive barrels? I'll get right on it.

don't forget the conc rifle powerup.

err...

You could model a broken statue or fountain in the middle of the platform and add 4 benches in the edges centered at it. I think it should be broken, because the whole neighbourhood looks quite desolated.

That's quite a big area you have there. I don't know how much detail you plan to add but keep in mind the HL2 engine can't handle much architectural detail. If you want to make things detailed you'll have to open XSI, 3dsmax or a nother 3d modeling program. That and the fact that with my medium sized mp level the compiler already crapped out because I had too much brushes, were kind of the reason I stopped editing HL2.

The editor is a bit confusing at first, but works alright after a while, though it's not very good compared to GTKradiant for the quake3 engine. Switching from the JK engine (you are right?) you should keep in mind that having vertices that aren't positioned on the grid will screw up compiling time and cause leeks if they are outer boundries of your level. (so making detailed rounded stuff out of architecture isn't a bright idea)

Add a blue police box and I'll love you forever. XD

ZOOIkes, I'm switching from the Unreal engine and JA. This is fairly similar to Unreal editing, so it's not too much of a problem. I'll keep what you said about brushes in mind.

Reminds me of that one part in The Matrix when Neo fights 5 gazillion Agent Smiths.

[QUOTE=Pedro T Hutt]Add a blue police box and I'll love you forever. XD[/QUOTE]
YES.

Who would want a blue police box

I know a would

Who WOULDN'T want a blue police box?

Lol. Actually, I thought that the first pic was from JK using 16bit textures. I was about to say NICE SKYBOX. Actually thats probably why it takes Valve sooo long to release new Day of Defeat:s maps.

This editor is frickin' inefficient. It takes ages to make shapes I could make in minutes with radiant.

for the brief time that HL2 functioned on my PC I did all my mapping in GTK and just did the specific stuff like displacments and some entities in hammer.
I even got lights and player spawns to convert.

Hammer sucks.